Away from Her, Let's Get Lost

Away from Her is a film about memory, love and loss, directed by Sarah Polley, a young actress who made her mark with roles in The Sweet Hereafter and eXistenZ. It stars Julie Christie as Fiona, a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), can do little else but stand by helplessly as she sinks deeper and deeper into a life without memory. When she finds solace with another patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), his love for his wife deepens. He gives her all the space she needs to live out her days as best she sees fit. His love is accommodating and expansive. Ultimately, Away from Her is as much about his loss as hers. Grant's relationship with his wife is comparative to the onset of Alzheimer's. Now you have her, now you don't. It comes and goes, with an agonizingly progressive slippery hold.

Ms. Polley chooses to visualize some of the effects of this disease partly with some inexplicable, grainy visuals of what might be a young Fiona. But who is remembering? Fiona? Or her husband? It's not clear, much like the confusion at the heart of Alzheimer's disease. Perhaps her intention was to convey a fleeting hold on the past - thoughts of one's youth that can be likened to filigrees with holes getting bigger and bigger, doomed to gradually obliterate the images contained inside. These flickery pictures have the delicate tenuousness of a fading remembrance, much like wispy threads that must seem so frustratingly flyaway in someone knowing they are losing their mind. Fiona's face, folded by a thousand wrinkles, reflects a life lived dense with emotion and expression. It now conveys an etched blankness. It's as if her lines have died. They just lie there with nowhere to go, sunken into a face paralyzed by a lackluster mind. Away from Her is an affecting film about an aging couple's experience with this monstrous disease, an affliction threatening to erase one woman's life as if it never existed.